Emily Hobhouse: Beloved Traitor. Elsabé Brits
and Emily could only stay with them if Major General George Pretyman, the military governor of Bloemfontein, gave his permission in writing. Caroline was worried that if she were to put a foot wrong, her two daughters and Charles would be punished. Emily went to see Pretyman forthwith.137
He nearly “jumped out of his skin” when he heard that she intended to stay with Caroline, whose husband had died six months earlier, as she was supposedly “a bitter woman”, but Emily was ready with a reassuring explanation: “My visit may have a softening effect upon her.”138 Pretyman reluctantly granted her permission to stay with the Fichardts in their beautiful home, Kaya Lami. Emily used the opportunity to ask Pretyman for a permit to visit the camps south of Bloemfontein. She made it quite clear to him that she was not there to do the military authorities’ work for them, but to give advice and to investigate the condition of the women and children in the camps and render assistance where she could. Everywhere she learned that farms were being burnt down indiscriminately and that more concentration camps were being erected in the Free State and the Transvaal.
From his remarks, too, it was obvious that Kitchener despised the Boers and “[i]n general ... had a low opinion of [them], describing them as ‘savages with only a thin white veneer.’”139 About the women he said that they “were outstripping men in their bitterness and commitment to the war, and the only remedy to bring them to their senses would be to confine what he called the worst class to a camp.”140
It was only Emily’s second day in Bloemfontein, and she was already disillusioned with the officers who had no plan for providing the women with clothing. She did not mince her words: “Crass male ignorance, stupidity, helplessness and muddling. I rub as much salt into the sore places of their minds as I possibly can, because it is so good for them; but I can’t help melting a little when they are very humble and confess that the whole thing is a grievous and gigantic blunder and presents an almost insoluble problem, and they don’t know how to face it.”141
The concentration camp at Bloemfontein was about three kilometres from the city centre, situated on the southern slope of a koppie in the barren veld without a single tree. There were 2 000 women, 900 children and a few men – the “hands-up men” (handsuppers, as the Boers called them) – in the camp. These were men who had laid down their arms voluntarily and in most cases had signed an oath of neutrality.142 The first woman Emily met there was Mrs PJ Botha. There was nothing in her tent – only flies, heat, her five children and a black servant girl. Several other women joined them in the tent to tell their stories too. They cried and even laughed together, and “chatted in bad Dutch and bad English all the afternoon”.143
While they were sitting there, a snake slithered into the tent and everyone ran out. Emily, who “could not bear to think the thing should be at large in a community mostly sleeping on the ground”, attacked the creature with her parasol until a man arrived and finished it off.144
Over the next few days, the women each told Emily their personal stories: how their farmhouses and crops had been burnt, their livestock killed or injured and left to die; how they had been transported for days on wagons and/or trains and been forced into the camp … They were stories of loss, exposure, starvation, illness, pain and longing. “The women are wonderful; they cry very little and never complain … Only when it cuts afresh at them through their children do their feelings flash out.”145
Within four days, Emily discovered the nature and extent of the misery in the camp. The most basic necessities of life were lacking. There were not even candles; they were only used when someone was seriously ill. There was no soap, and none had ever been supplied.
There was no mortuary tent; the dead lay in the heat among the living until they were buried. Flies lay thick and black on everything. Six people on average were crowded into one little tent, but in many cases a tent housed about nine or ten inmates.146
There was no school for the children. There was virtually no wood or coals to boil any drinking water or food, and the water of the Modder River was filthy. Typhoid was rife. Water was limited to two buckets for eight people – for drinking, washing and cooking. The food rations were not nearly sufficient to stave off hunger and disease.
It was “murder to the children” to keep these camps going, which were probably housing 50 000 people by this time, Emily realised.
Her suggestion to Captain Albert Hume, who had been designated to give her a hearing, was that a railway boiler be obtained and that all water be boiled in it. The 50 cows that were supposed to provide the camp inmates with milk were so starved that they produced only four buckets of milk per day. She was also concerned about the “native camp” with about 500 people who were in need of aid.147
Emily meticulously recorded the rations as they were measured out in the Bloemfontein camp on 16 January 1901 (see sidebar).
“Refugees”
Flour or mealie-meal: 1 lb per day
Meat: ¾ lb per day
Coffee: 1 oz per day
Sugar: 2 oz per day
Salt: ½ oz per day
“Undesirables”
Mealie-meal (or samp, potatoes, flour, rice): ¾ lb per day
Meat: 1 lb, twice a week
Coffee: 1 oz per day
Sugar: 2 oz per day
Salt: ½ oz per day
Children under 6 years (“Refugees”)
Flour or mealie-meal: ½ lb per day
Meat: ½ lb per day
Milk: ¼ tin per day
Sugar: 1 oz per day
Salt: ½ oz per day
Children under 6 years (“Undesirables”)
Mealie-meal: ½ lb per day
Meat: ½ lb twice a week
Milk: ¼ tin per day
Sugar: 1 oz per day
Salt: ½ oz per day148
Emily’s plan was to tell the “other side” of the war story based on an eyewitness account, an alternative narrative to the one that the military authorities and the British politicians were presenting to the world. She started writing down individual women’s stories (which eventually appeared in her book The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell).149 She also aimed to use the evidence she was gathering to compile a report for the South African Conciliation Committee in England.
Day after day Emily walked from tent to tent, with people calling her from all over: “Come and see, Sister.” (Many of the women regarded Emily as a nurse, hence the name “Sister”.) Among the sights that she saw:
A baby of six months “gasping its life out on its mother’s knee”.
Children who were so weak from measles that they were uable to walk, lying there “white and wan”.
A dying 24-year-old woman lying on a stretcher on the ground.
Emily became exasperated with Captain Hume who considered her too sympathetic towards the camp inmates (she “wanted to box his ears”), and sent him to fetch some brandy for the dying woman.150
A man came up and asked her to look at his son, who had been sick for three months. “It was a dear little chap of four and nothing left of him except his great brown eyes and white teeth from which the lips were drawn back, too thin to close. His body was emaciated.”
An appalled Emily called Hume to observe the scene. “‘You shall look,’ I said. And I made him come in and showed him the complete child skeleton. Then at last he did say it was awful to see the children suffering so …” Yet there had been no milk available for the dying child.
“I can’t describe what it is to see these children lying about in a state of collapse – it is just exactly like faded flowers thrown away. And one hates to stand and look on at such misery and